


The Genius of the Western River

by Siria



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 09:29:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21317926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: Shane’s totally working on being flippant about all those times he joked about Ryan’s godlike physique, never suspecting how true those jokes might be—the two of them just have to defeat a supernatural serial killer first. (ARivers of Londonfusion AU.)
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 74
Kudos: 264





	The Genius of the Western River

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Trinityofone for patient and incisive beta reading, as always, and to Sheafrotherdon for audiencing. This fic draws on some of the worldbuilding ideas of Ben Aaronovitch’s _Rivers of London_ series of books, though I don’t think you need to have read any of them in order to understand this story.

"Well, talk about your epic journeys," Shane said, pitching his voice for the benefit of the GoPro as Ryan parked the car. "Round about mile five I started to get real antsy, I was this close to whipping out the ole 'are we there yet?' But then what do you know: here we are! Can't beat the travel perks of this job, right?"

The BuzzFeed accountants were keeping a pretty tight hold of the purse strings these days and liked to chirp things about _doing more with less_ and _creative but cost-saving_. Still, Shane thought, there should have been enough in the budget to take them further from the office than Glendale Narrows for at least one episode. If he'd had his druthers, they'd have been heading out of the city, but Ryan had been adamant that they stick close to home for this season's finale.

And Shane got it, or thought he did. Everyone at work was that little bit more stressed, that little bit more anxious, these days. Ryan had dark circles under his eyes nearly constantly now, enough that Shane was starting to get just a tad worried about him. Their viewing figures were strong so Shane didn't think their show was in danger of being cancelled any time soon, but Ryan probably wanted to show the higher ups that the Unsolved Boys were capable of delivering maximum bang for the proverbial. Ryan's relentless hustle was one of the things that Shane admired about him, even if he was too unambitious himself to ever want to do the same.

"Perks!" Ryan said, voice tense with the kind of manic energy he normally only channelled when some flim-flam artist had just convinced him that a demon had manifested itself in a grilled cheese sandwich. "Ha! Not exactly!"

Shane was going to stop letting him drink caffeine.

To be fair, Shane thought as they got out of the car, a little bit of manic something-or-other was maybe justified on Ryan's part this time. It was one thing to talk about horrors that had happened fifty years ago and a thousand miles away. It was another to discuss old Hollywood murders, when almost everyone who'd ever met William Desmond Taylor or the Black Dahlia was likely dead and gone and their faces were known only through sepia-toned old photographs. But it was something else again to come to a park barely a couple of miles from where you lived, to stand there in broad daylight and to know that for the past few years it had been a dumping ground for a serial killer.

It gave Shane both the heebies and the jeebies, if he was being frank.

And hell, BuzzFeed was paying him to be frank, so he said as much aloud.

"This is not a _perk_," Ryan said darkly, and jabbed viciously at the lock button on his car keys. "I just want you to remember that."

"Roger that," Shane said blithely, because Ryan was clearly in some kind of mood. And sure, sometimes Shane's response to Ryan being in some kind of mood was to find a stick (usually metaphorical, but that one time in Arizona, literal) to poke him with. But sometimes, to jump from the carriage of one metaphorical train to the other, Shane was able to put his hands behind his back and stop himself from pulling any pigtails. 

Besides, gliding right past that particular moment of Bergara Brand weird meant that Shane had some space to monologue, and everyone knew what happened when you gave Shane Madej space to monologue. "We're starting this very _special_ BuzzFeed Unsolved episode at Sunnynook River Park right here in Los Angeles, and what a name that is, folks! _Sunnynook_. There's a name that was conjured up following a focus group led by someone who uses both 'leverage' and 'synergize' as verbs regularly and without shame. You got your sun here, that's undeniable, because we're in southern California, but I'm personally finding it all lacking in nookishness. Is there anything here that says _nook_? You got some trees, sure, but then you've also got a majestic view of a couple giant electricity pylons and the sound of a freeway right over there which is, and I hope no one's going to think I'm exaggerating here, but it's _thunderous_."

Heebies and jeebies aside, Shane wasn't entirely averse to the episode idea. True, he'd pushed for the alternative that someone had pitched at a BUN meeting. A whole season spent cooped up filming in the office had made him a little fidgety, and the prospect of three days on a ranch in Montana—all that sky—was enticing.

Ryan, however, had seemed oddly reluctant to leave the city. 

("C'mon," Shane had said after the meeting when they'd both headed to the break room to grab a drink. "It'd be a great fodder for an episode! Lovelorn ghost cowboys pining for one another even after death, we could sell the hell out of that. Break out the hats again. We could even do a bit where you rope me." Shane mimed twirling a lasso over his head and then throwing it. "Lasso these lanky limbs."

"Bullwhip the big guy?" Ryan flushed to the tips of his ears right after saying that but shot Shane a look out of the corner of his eye that… well, that had Shane forcefully reminding himself not to confuse Bergara being congenitally unable to back down from a challenge with actual interest. 

Shane was smart enough to know about confirmation bias, even if he was still enough of a dumbshit that he couldn't entirely squash all his idle hopes.) 

"Think of it this way," Ryan had said. "You, me, no crew. We spend the day walking out and back along the river. It'll be a challenge! Like… like seeing if we can do an open-air bottle ep. You're not going to back down from a _challenge_, right?"

(Shane was also just self-aware enough to know that one of the reasons he and Ryan got on so well was that if you drew out a Venn diagram of their respective forms of idiocy, there'd be a sizeable intersection.)

Given that Ryan had pushed for them to spend the episode covering this particular case, Shane had been pretty surprised not to see him do any of his usual research in advance. But now, as they set out north, Shane was even more surprised to hear how smoothly Ryan spoke when Shane turned the camera on him to get some establishing background info. Ryan didn't even refer to notes before saying that the river's full name in Spanish was el Río de Nuestra Señora La Reina de Los Ángeles de Porciúncula.

"But its older name, its real name as far as the Tongva people are concerned, is Paayme Paxaayt," Ryan continued. "For generations, the Tongva lived among the thick forests of willows and reeds that grew along its banks, fishing and hunting and gathering, living in villages like Ahau and Tevaaxaanga and Chibugna, before the Spanish came. The Tongva didn't mind that the river changed its path or flooded every so often, they'd learned to live with it, but the later colonisers were less keen on that. In the 1930s, the city administration ensured that most of the river's 48 miles were canalised, encased in concrete, and—"

"And so blessing us with the setting for such noted cinematic car chases as _Terminator 2_ and also the musical masterpiece that is _Grease_," Shane cut in, before hitting pause on the GoPro. "Okay, what in the hell kind of hidden Wikipedia cache did you stumble across? You still can't say _February_ nine times out of ten but suddenly you can reel off…." Shane paused, his mind going blank. There had been a lot of vowels. "… whatever those names were?"

"Not 'suddenly'," Ryan said, hitching a shoulder. "This is just, you know, the kind of stuff that a real Angeleno knows." 

He wasn't meeting Shane's eyes, but he didn't sound like he was lying, and he wasn't broadcasting any of his usual tells, so Shane was conflicted. On the one hand, he was pretty sure the vast majority of people living in L.A. couldn't tell you who the land's original owners were, let alone pronounce the names of their long-lost settlements with familiar ease. 

On the other hand, maybe Shane was committing some White Bullshit here.

Before Shane could say anything else, they were interrupted by a passing cyclist who wanted a selfie with them. That would never get any less weird—even though Shane supposed they were asking to be recognised, what with him wearing his Hiking Dad Hat for the occasion and Ryan venturing out in public with arms like that. By the time the fan had moved on, the sun was getting higher in the sky.

"We'd better get going," Ryan said, jerking a thumb in the direction of Griffith Park. 

As they walked, Shane took the opportunity to film his own background bit to camera. "I know people often say they're on the trail of a serial killer, but here we're literally on the trail of a serial killer. At least ten bodies have been found along the stretch of the L.A. River known as the Glendale Narrows in the last two and a half years. This would be awful but not unusual for a big city if not for the fact that all the victims are united by what we in the biz technically refer to as _weird shit_."

Ryan heaved a sigh. "This is how you want to approach this? Really?"

"Well, it's better than thinking about any of it in detail," Shane said, "on account of how it's also gross and unsettling."

It wasn't that Shane had broken his usual rule of not researching the cases beforehand, but despite what a couple of the weirder internet theories about him posited, he didn't actually live under a rock. He had wifi, and he had ears, and for the last few months people in L.A. had been talking about the Glendale Narrows Killer the same way that they talked about the availability of street parking: which was to say a lot, and with a near religious fervour. There were at least two podcasts about the case, and a major exposé by the _Los Angeles Times_ which boiled down to "there's a whistleblower who wants everyone to know that the LAPD is freaking the fuck out about this because the forensics don't make a lick of sense!"

Which wasn't reassuring at all, but then all of Shane's incipient gastric ulcers could tell you that no one in the year of our Lord 2019 looked to the news for anything so picayune as reassurance.

Shane had presumed they'd follow the bike lane north, because there wasn't really anywhere else for them to go. On one side of them, the concrete culverts sloped sharply down to the river; on the other, traffic roared past on the Five. But as soon as they hit the stretch where the river started to widen out, its bottom natural rather than man-made, Ryan made to hop over the low railing which ran along the edge of the bike path.

"Are you sure that's a good idea, buddy?" Shane was all for regular workplace risk-taking, like taunting demons; he was less keen on the idea of drowning in a waterway composed largely of run-off from wastewater treatment plants. No panache. "I don't think there's anywhere for us to stand down there."

"There will be," Ryan said, and sure enough when Shane sighed and followed him down—in for a penny, in for doing dumb shit with your best friend—there was a little patch of ground just big enough for two people to stand on, if neither of those people minded squashing some cattails underfoot. Dozens of birds perched on the small rocks which poked here and there out of the shallow water, their chatter just about audible over the traffic noise. It was a weird combination of peaceful and not.

"The third victim was found over there," Ryan said, pointing to a spot on the opposite bank. "Behind that tree. Ginny Muñoz, 27, a dental technician. And then a couple hundred yards that way, the eighth. Jordan Mueller, 20, a student at UCLA." 

Shane dutifully panned the camera to where Ryan indicated, although of course there really wasn't anything to see there now: just sunbaked concrete and sand, interspersed with some scrubby bushes that looked like they definitely regretted their choice of where to germinate. That was what unsettled Shane the most about the sites that they visited: how places that had witnessed the most sordid of crimes could look so totally normal.

Well, that and bats.

"Eagle-eyed viewers are probably starting to pick up on some of the puzzling aspects of this case," Shane said. "You try to paddle in the river here and you're barely going to get your ankles wet. And yes, we all know the whole thing about being able to drown in a couple inches of water, but here we've got an epidemic of people who've all supposedly drowned in a river that's basically a stream with delusions of grandeur—"

Ryan shot him a filthy look. Angelenos could get tetchy about their city.

"—but whose bodies have all been found several feet away from the water while also showing signs of, wait for it, severe dehydration?" Shane turned the camera around so that he could get a good shot of him arching first one and then both eyebrows. "Absolutely weird shit, my friends. Stay tuned as we try to find the rational explanation behind said weird shit which Ryan will absolutely refuse to acknowledge."

He stopped the recording again, and shuffled around to look at Ryan. "So, what do you want to do next? Follow the path some more, or hang out here and try to get some B-roll? I think that heron over there's giving me the glad eye, I bet I could entice him to show us some primo wing span."

"How," Ryan said, folding his arms, "how is it we're standing near where multiple people were murdered in m—in some fucked up ways and you make it so that that's not the _weirdest_ shit—"

"I am large," Shane said solemnly, "in metric, imperial, and Whitman-ian senses."

Ryan sighed. "Let's keep going," he said. "There's been some interesting stuff on the boards about where they found the very first victim."

They scrambled back up to the bike path and Shane turned the camera back on. "Okay, we're headed for the spot where the first victim was found. That's another, what—"

"Fifteen minutes from here," Ryan confirmed.

"—so bringing us up into the Griffith Park area proper. Little known fact, this popular municipal park began its life as a haunted ostrich farm! And—"

"Okay, there's no need to fuck with m—"

"—I am not _fucking_ with you. You're telling me you prepped for this episode by memorising vocabulary in a Native American language but you overlooked the second coolest fact about Griffith Park as listed on its Wikipedia page?"

"I'm going to regret this," Ryan said absently. "I am, I know it, I can feel it in my bones, but: what is the coolest fact about Griffith Park as listed on its Wikipedia page?"

"It's home to one of the largest playgrounds in all of the greater Los Angeles area." Shane spread his arms wide and mimed a dramatic drum roll on the bongos. "Called, wait for it... Shane's Inspiration."

"Jesus Christ," Ryan said with feeling. 

The stretch of river where the presumed first victim had been found didn't look so different to the one they'd come from, except for the two shopping carts that were upturned midstream, some plump birds nesting on them. The water was even shallower here, broken by a few islands of gravel and mud. 

"Police still haven't identified the first victim," Ryan said. "White male, maybe late 20s, no ID on the body, no one's come forward to claim him. And because this was the first killing, the media didn't really pick up on it in the way they did the later ones."

"Like Sir Mix-a-lot, I cannot lie," Shane said. "I sense a 'but' coming."

"There was some talk online about how right where the body was found is where three ley lines m—"

"Oh no, no," Shane said, holding up his hands. "Ryan, no. I'm not condoning any talk of ley lines. I refuse. That's just the map equivalent of someone staring really hard at a bologna sandwich until they see Jesus' face in it."

"There's some compelling evidence for—"

"None, there is none. There is no evidence for ley lines, because they're not—"

"_Anyway_," Ryan said, "I'm going to take a closer look."

"At the thing you couldn't see _even if they existed_?" Shane blinked. "This is going to make for a compelling audiovisual experience, let me tell you."

They waited until a group of joggers had passed and then climbed down to the river's edge. There had to be some sort of weird forced perspective thing going on, because the thin sliver of land which passed for a river bank didn't seem like it could be wide enough for Shane to put his foot on—and yet. And the water seemed like it should come up to at least mid-calf, even on Shane, but Ryan was able to walk over to one of the patches of muddy gravel without apparently getting his boots wet.

Shane filmed him standing there and looking down at the ground without speaking for a long moment. Then, with deliberate slowness, Ryan bent over and said, "Huh."

"What huh? How huh?" 

When there was no answer, Shane waded over to the little island—most _definitely_ getting his feet wet, what the fuck—to see what had caught Ryan's attention. It was... well, it was mud and gravel. Shane felt distinctly underwhelmed. You got mud and gravel all over. You got it in Schaumburg. Exotic, it was not.

"Are we looking at a ley line right now?" Shane asked in his most obnoxious stage whisper.

"No," Ryan said. He took a deep breath and looked up at Shane, eyes wide and pleading. "Okay, this wasn't exactly the moment I'd planned to tell you the rest of it but I didn't realise any of this stuff was here and I'm pretty sure it needs to come out right away, because I had no idea, and I totally should have felt this. So could you just maybe not get like, weird about any of this until I've had the chance to explain?"

"If this is a bit," Shane said slowly, "I'm not getting it." He was starting to feel a bit uneasy—worried, if he was being honest with himself. Ryan had gone from zero to trembling with a speed he normally achieved only when the spirit box told him that a demon was standing right behind him, and words spilling from him at a rate he'd only previously matched when riding a high of sleep deprivation and three cans of Red Bull. Shane enjoyed teasing him about clear and present bullshit, sure, but that didn't mean he wanted to push Ryan over the edge into a heart attack. 

"If this was a bit," Ryan said, "believe me when I say that my life would make a hell of a lot more sense." Then he plunged his hand into the mud and pulled out a bundle of leather and cloth. It came free with a weird sucking noise, as if the ground itself were trying to keep hold of it—or maybe it was the other way around? Ryan made a disgusted noise and opened the bundle. "A hex bag. No _wonder_ everything's seemed off lately."

Shane grimaced at the contents of the bundle: a mass of bones and hair and rotting plant matter, like a health hazard version of the tourist nonsense that Bloody Mary had peddled them back in New Orleans. "That's a lot of chickens you're holding there, bud."

Ryan looked grim, even a little green around the gills. "These aren't chicken bones. Here, take this." He pressed the bundle into Shane's hands, then rummaged in his pockets for a moment before producing one of those little salt packets you got with fast food and a lighter. "Now hold still."

Before Shane had a chance to say anything, Ryan had sprinkled the salt on the bundle, murmured something in a language that Shane didn't recognise, and lit the whole mess on fire. Shane bit back a yelp, but although the bundle burned fiercely and quickly it let out no heat. In a matter of seconds, the whole thing had been reduced to a fine ash that blew away on the breeze. 

"Oh, oh boy." Ryan blinked rapidly, staring around him with wide eyes. He pressed the heel of one hand to his chest, right over his heart. "Shit, why couldn't I feel any of this before? It was all… muted, I shouldn't have been _worried_, I should have been fucking pissing myself. And there's more, there's—"

Ryan hunkered back down and thrust his arm into the muck and gravel once more, right up to the elbow, his brow furrowed in concentration like he was rummaging around in the innards of a couch in search of a pen he knew had gotten lost there. But when Ryan gave a low noise of triumph and stood back up, he didn't have a pen in his hand. Instead, he was clutching an honest-to-god sword, like a prop from a King Arthur movie. It was easily four feet long, and the blade caught the Californian sunlight in a way that made Shane think of the ring of steel against steel and the smell of blood. 

"Uh," Shane said. 

Ryan tilted the sword this way and that, examining it from every angle with narrowed eyes. "There's _vestigia_ all over this, but the hex bag was blocking it. Do you think it was a Freudian thing, like 'oh hey, I'm going to stab you with this metaphorical dick but try to make sure you don't notice'?"

Shane hadn't felt this confused by the world since November 2016, but it didn't take much to put two and 'this is a murderer's dumping ground' together and get a pretty plausible four. "Is that—Jesus Christ, Ryan, you shouldn't be touching that! That's evidence! DNA, fingerprints—have you _never_ half-watched an episode of _CSI_ while stoned?" 

Admittedly, Shane couldn't remember so much as a hint that any of the Glendale Narrows Killer's victims had been murdered with a sword, but there was no way that thing hadn't been used to do a crime. He hurriedly switched off the camera, because he figured it probably wouldn't be great to have 1080p proof of them contaminating evidence.

"This isn't the murder weapon," Ryan said absently. "At least not lately. Hold it for a moment?"

Shane talked a good game, but he recognised that he'd long ago lost the ability to say no to Ryan about most things other than the existence of ghosts. He found himself holding the sword—heavier than he'd thought, and weirdly greasy—and watching while Ryan started to strip. He blinked, feeling his cheeks heat. "If this is an elaborate yet surreal prank, kudos for the effort, buddy, but I'm not quite getting the underlying, you know..."

Ryan stepped out of his jeans to reveal that underneath he was wearing a pair of those skintight, hip-to-ankle trunks favoured by Olympic swimmers. 

"Thrust," Shane finished weakly. 

"I need to go check something out," Ryan said. "Stay here, I'll be back in a minute and I'll explain everything then, I _promise_, but this can't wait."

Then he turned and dived into the river.

Shane took a moment to deal with that. He'd taken an intro to neuroscience gen ed in his time and passed it with colours that, if not flying, were at least aloft. He knew that from a certain point of view, all of reality was just a vivid hallucination conjured up by a lump of fat and electricity sitting in the perpetual dark inside its house made of bone. Perception was subjective. Memory was fallible. Human reasoning could fail.

But then again, he'd just watched his best friend take his clothes off in broad daylight and dive—with a splash!—into a river that was maximum six inches deep. 

And vanish. 

Shane inched closer to the edge of the little island and stooped to peer into the water. Nada.

If this was a prank, then it was the kind of one that took a whole team of people, some very large mirrors, and possibly a couple of holograms to pull off. Shane considered this, and then toyed with the idea that Ryan really had defied the laws of physics after somehow divining the location of a grab-bag of weird bones and a sword that... were those runes etched the length of the blade? 

His head ached gently in the way it normally did only once his liver had spent several hours processing a quantity of shitty tequila.

"What in the _fuck_," Shane said. It occurred to him that if anyone were to walk past right now and see him—standing in the middle of a river, on top of a fricking known murder site, holding an _actual sword_—that he would be arrested so hard. He was just starting to seriously panic about that, and to wonder if he could get away with trying to rebury the damn thing, when Ryan reappeared.

By "reappeared", what Shane meant was "hauled himself out of the river while beads of water ran down his ridiculous chest and, once upright, pushed his wet hair out of his eyes with his frankly stupid arms", but that kind of ordered syntax was hard to achieve when Ryan had very clearly, in his entirety, emerged from an extremely shallow watercourse.

"All clear for now," Ryan said.

This could not be happening.

"Are you a mermaid?" Shane blurted out, because that seemed a safer bet than swallowing his tongue. "Merman? Merperson. Is there a widely accepted non-gendered form beca—"

"No." Ryan shook his head. He wrapped his arms around his middle as if he were cold, despite the day's heat. "No, that's—I mean, no to being a mer-whatever. I don't know about the gender thing."

It took Shane a moment to understand the expression on Ryan's face, the slump of his shoulders, and when he did it made his stomach clench. Ryan was afraid—not of the Killer, which was a rational fear if Shane had ever heard of one—but of whatever Shane was going to ask or do next. Whatever Ryan was, mer-whatever or not, he thought Shane was going to run, was going to leave him.

Shane didn't much like how that made him feel in response. He didn't think of himself as a violent man, but maybe there was someone he needed to travel back in time and punch in the face. 

Kick really hard in the shins, at a minimum.

"Well," Shane said eventually, drawing out the word because frankly if brains had gears, his was still struggling to find its way into first. "Merperson or not, buddy, I would like to know what the ever-loving fuck is going on here."

"Okay, just…" Ryan stooped to pull his clothes back on. Somehow, despite how wet he was and how damp his clothes must have been from lying on the ground, when he straightened back up again he was entirely dry. "Can you promise me you'll at least _listen_ first, that you'll let me explain?"

"Pinky swear," Shane said, solemnly crooking his little finger and meaning it. "Not going anywhere."

Ryan puffed out his chest a little, the way he always did when he felt like he needed a burst of bravery even though Shane had never thought cowardice was one of Ryan's faults—if anything, it was the opposite. He cleared his throat and gestured at the waters around them. "Okay, so, the technical term for me is a _genius loci_. The simplest way to define it is... well, I'm the river. The river is me. From a certain point of view."

Shane said the only thing which came to mind. "Fuck off."

Ryan's shoulders fell. "You said you'd let me explain!"

"Yeah, which requires an explanation, not a..." Shane tried to gesture but then realised he was still holding a sword. "Fucking... Obi-wan Zen koan. You're telling me you're a _river_?"

"Well, that sounded less stuck-up than saying I'm the god of it. I mean, minor deity, really."

"Nancy Reagan was right about exactly one thing," Shane said. "I _should_ have said no."

"Jesus Christ, you're not high," Ryan said, and there was just enough irritation in his voice to make Shane really start to believe he was telling the truth—a faint echo of the time they'd spent a couple weeks too long on the road in the Midwest. The continual close quarters had started to build a kind of nettled frustration between them that had blown itself out in a pissy half-argument in the parking lot of an IHOP in Junction City, Kansas. "I'm the personification of the Los Angeles River and I have been for like the last twenty-two years."

If Shane had had a pen in his hand instead of his sword, he would have thrown it. "You _became_ the personification of the Los Angeles River at… at age seven? What kind of a job ad is—"

"It's not like I applied for it," Ryan said, tossing out his arms in frustration. "Look, you remember that story I told you once about how when I was seven I was climbing a tree while playing hide-and-seek and I fell into a pile of bricks and hit my head?"

"Yeah?" 

"Well, by 'pile of bricks' I meant 'this river' and by 'hit my head' I meant 'drowned'."

"What," Shane said flatly, because he'd seen photos of Ryan as a kid and that was an image he'd never wanted in his head. Acid roiled in the pit of his stomach. "You—"

"Obviously, I got better!" Ryan stretched a hand out over the river and Shane blinked as the water beneath it spiralled upwards in a column, like metal filings pulled inexorably towards a magnet. "Just, when I woke up again, I was me but... I was something else as well."

"You're a fifty-mile-long stretch of river," Shane said, but even he could hear the shift in his voice: from _this is such bullshit_ to _holy shit my doofus best friend isn't human_. He felt like he'd just sprinted flat-out for several blocks, his chest aching and his head swimming.

"The river hadn't been a River for a while," Ryan said, letting the water resume its natural course, "what with the canalisation and the pollution and the general human fuckery. The old _genius loci_ had… well, I'm still not sure if 'died' is the right word because I've got a bunch of their memories and stuff. But I fell in right at the moment the environmental restoration project was starting to have an effect and people were starting to believe I—it—could be something again."

Shane squinted at him. "Just to be sure I've got this right: you're saying you were reverse Tinkerbell-ed into becoming the tutelary deity of a geographical feature when you were in elementary school?"

Ryan sighed. "Basically."

"Well, fuck me," Shane said, after taking a long moment to ponder that one. "That's a lot, buddy. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm glad you're alive even if, uh, aquatic. Just… jeez."

"It's a bit Peter Parker, I suppose," Ryan said, holding out his hand for the sword. Shane gave it to him and was glad to see that he seemed a little steadier—maybe because Shane hadn't just called him a nut and headed for the hills. "You know, great power, great responsibilities."

"Just with more ducks than spiders," Shane said. 

"But also still with the whole thing where there are people out there trying to kill you just because." Ryan did some kind of complicated gesture with his hand and the sword simply... vanished. Like a street magician doing a sleight of hand trick, only there was no way in hell that Ryan had hidden the thing up his sleeve or behind his ear. "I just put it somewhere else for a bit. Someone would probably call the cops if I walked back to the car with it."

"Yeah," Shane said dryly, "that'd be the odd encounter with the law here, you want to back up there to the thing about people trying to _kill you_?"

"Not specifically _me_ me," Ryan said, turning and leading the way back to the river bank. Once more, his feet stayed dry while Shane's were soaked. Asshole. "I mean, I'm not happy about it but I don't think it's personal."

Once they were back over the fence and safely on the path, Shane said, "That's... maybe gratifying, but also not particularly comforting?"

"You might be surprised how often that's a thing for me," Ryan said.

* * *

They walked to the car in silence and then, Shane was very relieved to find, did not drive back to the BuzzFeed offices. 

"In-n-Out or Dinah's?" Ryan asked, hands flexing against the wheel.

"Dinah's," Shane said firmly. There was no denying the magic of the animal fries, but in times of true existential distress, the only sensible option was to eat your own body weight in fried chicken.

At this time of day, it took them only about ten minutes to reach the diner, and since the lunchtime rush hadn't quite started yet, Ryan managed to snag a place in the strip mall's tiny lot. Shane was right on the verge of cracking a joke about the god of parking smiling on them, but then he started wondering if Ryan's existence implied that there really was a guy you could pray to if you got one too many tickets.

"I was not prepared for this much theology on a Monday," he muttered to himself as they walked over to the diner's main entrance.

Inside, the server showed them to a table right in the corner, which was considerate of her. Shane wanted to have his breakdown over a mound of fried chicken parts in private, as was his constitutional right as an American citizen. 

"You understand that I have like... a lot of questions still," Shane said once the server had taken their order and left. "So very many questions."

"I mean, I've met you, so yeah." Ryan was staring at the paper napkin that he was slowly and methodically reducing to tiny pieces.

Shane felt suddenly, terribly angry, as if the initial shock had muted his emotions but now they were all coming roaring back. "Let's start with the fact that I've seen you jump three feet in the air when a motion sensor light comes on, but there's a serial killer out there who's trying to, to do something _magical_"—Shane spat the word out with all the force it deserved—"with a piece of technology that pre-dates the invention of sliced bread and you're all blasé about it? You're Ryan Bergara! You've never been blasé about a thing in your life."

"Look, I have no idea if the sword is—"

The server came back with their drinks. Shane gave her what he hoped was a polite smile in thanks. He didn't think it worked. Both her eyebrows climbed towards her hairline and she hurried back towards the service counter. 

"And another thing," Shane said, jabbing his straw in Ryan's direction, "you have done something in front of me which I can only call magic and you'd better believe I'm pissed about the fact that I have to use that word, and you are also apparently and allegedly not entirely human, but your job is _ghost hunting_? What is that? Is it Freudian? Reverse psychology? What?"

"How the hell should I know?" Ryan snapped, before sighing and pushing a hand through his hair. "It's not like they give you a manual for this, Jesus Christ. When I woke up, I had... bits of the previous River's memories in my head, that's maybe the best way of putting it. That's how I know I'm a _genius loci_, or that when the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, that means I've encountered some _vestigia_—that's trace magic. I mean, I met the Cuyahoga once, but she's not that much older than me and way more into fixing her own ecosystem than getting to know any other Rivers, which I understand. This isn't—"

The server deposited their plates and silverware in front of them. The purse of her lips said she thought they were in the middle of relationship drama and that she wanted none of it, which told Shane that she was a lady of taste and discretion. "You folks enjoy," she said, with a distinct undertone of _do not start anything physical before I clock out_, which Shane could also respect. He decided to tip generously.

"Look, what I mean is I don't know a whole lot more than you do in the grand scheme of things," Ryan continued once she'd left. "It's… it's like in the movies when someone wakes up with amnesia and they don't know anyone around them or what year it is but they can still, like, speak English and remember how to use a toilet."

Shane took a very angry bite out of his chicken, and then found that it was really hard to stay angry when eating excellent fried chicken.

Especially when Ryan Bergara was looking at you all big-eyed and sad, like you'd just kicked a puppy in front of him while saying that popcorn tasted like cardboard.

"So the show isn't like some weird reverse psychology bullshit, or me getting off on knowing stuff you don't," Ryan said. "I don't know where the Rivers come from, or why I'm one, or why there are ghosts or if there's a, a Mothman out there somewhere. I _want_ to know. I _want_ to have proof. The show seemed like a way to do that and also have a dental plan at the same time, you know?"

"I'm going to say 'sure' here," Shane said, "but you should know that what I really mean is, 'not really' and 'I feel a migraine coming on.'"

Ryan sighed and shovelled a mound of mashed potatoes into his mouth.

"But admittedly, part of that migraine stems from the fact that there's, what.... some kind of magic serial killer out there who wants to kill you? I mean, if nothing else that's just _rude_," Shane continued, stabbing at his potato salad with far more force than the poor tuber had earned or needed.

The only person who got to tease Ryan was him, dammit.

"Understatement." Ryan's brow furrowed. "Like I said, there was _vestigia_ on that sword, enough for me to get a sense of intent. But knowing that someone wants to do something bad to me is kind of a no-brainer."

"Well, I mean…" Shane picked up his own knife and mimed stabbing the rest of his chicken with it. A couple who'd been walking over to the table nearest Shane and Ryan did an about-turn and went to sit in the far corner of the diner. Smart cookies. "Duh. Also that bag of bone shit. Let's not forget that."

"Don't think I'll be able to do that any time soon," Ryan said.

"Do you think it's some kind of weird flex?" Shane asked while scooping up another forkful of potato salad. "Like hey, here I am, I'm a murderer! Just gonna… hide something sharp and phallic inside your sort of metaphorical, sort of actual body. Do serial killers have side hustles like that?"

"Fucked if I know," Ryan said, with a shrug. "Can't be anything good."

"Magic 8 ball says all signs point to no," Shane agreed.

* * *

Shane got a slice of pie to go, because it was a Monday and Ryan wasn't human and why the fuck not? Life was short and odd and it might as well have apple pie in it. He told Ryan as much around a mouthful of it once they got back to Shane's apartment, because the workday was clearly a loss and because no one should ever try to have a serious conversation around Ryan's room-mates, who to a man still thought that Axe body spray was the choice of an urban sophisticate.

Ryan grunted in something like agreement, but mostly seemed to be concentrating on melding with the arm of the sofa, like he was trying to get as far as possible away from—

A lightbulb went on over Shane's head. He could feel it: 60 watts at least. 

"Holy shit," he said, pointing back and forth from Ryan to precious, precious Obi. "You're a demi-god, you're not _allergic_, you're just making excuses because you don't like that _he_ doesn't like _you_!"

Ryan sputtered, cheeks heating, but didn't deny it.

"_He's_ a cat, _you're_ water, oh my god, is this what having an epiphany feels like?" Shane picked up Obi and embraced him with all the fervour of someone who owns a very good cat. Obi submitted to said embrace with what could, for a cat, be termed reasonably good grace. "Who's the best boy at detecting the presence of supernatural entities, huh? Huh? Is it you? Huh?"

"You're the worst," Ryan said on a sigh.

"Demonstrably not true," Shane said, letting a long-suffering Obi back down. "On account of how I haven't killed a lot of people for any reason, let alone because it's all part of my master plan to kill you."

"True," said Ryan, subsiding against the cushions.

"So what now?" Shane after a moment's silence. "Is this where we do the research montage to figure out who the bad guy is and how to thwart them and then we go chase them down in our mystery-solving mobile and capture them and pull off their wig and fake moustache and then right before the cops haul 'em off they shake their fist and say, 'And I'd've gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those pesky Ghoul Boys!'?"

"That is... so very specific."

"You would not say that if you knew about the time I dressed up as Daphne for Hallowe'en," Shane said. 

Making the demi-god of the Los Angeles River choke on air was a pretty gratifying experience, it turned out.

* * *

There wasn't a research montage. Ryan really didn't know that much about his abilities, Shane didn't exactly have a Giles-esque collection of occult books to look through for hints, and all attempts to turn to Google for advice just resulted in them knowing a lot more about the ids of a lot of strangers on the internet.

"Well that was enlightening, and by enlightening I mean gross," Shane said, snapping his laptop shut and placing it on the coffee table. Clicking on the image results tab had been a definite mistake. "No help there. I don't suppose you know of any ghost police?"

"Uh, we're it, I think," Ryan said. 

"I am a member of the ghost police," Shane said aloud, just to see what it felt like on the tongue. He shrugged. "Not any crazier than anything else I've heard today. Well, I guess if we've got to solve some supernatural crimes, we should really take a look at the supernatural evidence."

"There isn't much," Ryan said. He did something complicated with his hand—a gesture that Shane couldn't follow on account of how his brain was busy telling his eyeballs that they were mistaken because limbs simply couldn't do that—and was holding the sword again. "This, obviously."

"You said you could get a, a sense—"

"_Vestigia_."

"—right, that, from the sword. What exactly does that mean? Is it like a magic fingerprint or an occult CCTV camera or—"

"Sort of both of them and neither," Ryan said. "It's like deja vu, only for something that didn't happen to you. Like... remembering what a meal tasted like that someone else ate, or knowing that someone once stood where you're standing right now and that they were sad. Pretty much everything has _vestigia_ attached to it at least a little bit, but anything that's come into contact with magic, it's like it's all extra concentrated."

"So there's a lot on the sword, then?"

"Eh," Ryan said, waggling a hand. "Metal's actually only so-so at retaining _vestigia_. Better than wood or glass, a lot worse than stone."

Shane took that in. "What about the bodies? I don't think all of them have been buried yet, and I'm saying this like I know the first thing about breaking into a morgue but—"

Ryan was shaking his head. "_Vestigia_ fades from humans really quickly. I'd need to be right up close to a body within a couple of hours of death to get anything, and even then it's touch and go. With living people it's different, you can just..." 

He reached out and pressed his index finger and middle finger against the inside of Shane's wrist, right over his pulsepoint. Ryan was very gentle, but his touch felt like—it was like the anticipation of seeing a good old-fashioned Midwestern thunderstorm rolling across the plains towards you, and the painful thwack of static electricity, and the shocking first second after a dive into icy water, and the smell of ozone, all of them at once. Shane's breath caught. Each and every hair on the back of his neck stand up.

Ryan gaped at him.

"That's, uh, a _vestigia_, is it?" Shane asked after a moment. It took him a while, what with how his mouth was suddenly dry.

"I—I guess," Ryan said, looking away. He swallowed hard. "I'm just going to get a glass of water."

* * *

That was weird, but then again Shane's baseline for weird had been sort of permanently altered today—and that was after 2019 had already skewed it pretty hard. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and fired up Twitter. _You ever have one of those days when your cat helps you reach a new level of epistemological uncertainty?_ He launched that sucker into the Twitter ether, and turned his mind to more pressing matters. Namely, the fact that there was a serial killer running around Los Angeles who was trying to kill Ryan, and had succeeded in murdering a whole bunch of other innocent people along the way.

Something occurred to him. Shane got up and poked his head around the corner of his apartment's pokey little kitchen. Ryan was just standing there, hands braced against the counter while he stared into the sink.

"Hey."

Ryan jumped. "What?"

"You've got all these powers, you're the personification of this river. How come you didn't know already what was going on?" Shane waved a hand at him. "I mean, you had all of these dead bodies in you. On you? Adjacent to your... non-corporeal self? It sounds like some sort of illegal fetish no matter what way I put it."

Ryan shrugged, turning so that he was leaning against the cabinets. "The only thing I can guess is that the hex bag was part of a spell to keep me from noticing what was going on. Or even getting too worked up about the murders, maybe?"

Shane thought back over the past few months. Ryan had been a little more tense than normal, sure, but nothing that even in retrospect seemed like the appropriate amount of tension for an inexperienced supernatural entity who was finding himself the dumping ground for a disturbingly large number of corpses. "Frankly, your Bergara-ness hasn't seem like it's been firing on all cylinders, no."

"Is that an insult or not? No, don't answer that." Ryan shook his head. "But yeah, normally I have like a background sense of what's happening in the river and most of the watershed."

"Like if there's pollution or something?"

"Yeah, that can make me feel a bit gross. Low-grade food poisoning gross. Or like this one time, a guy lost control of his car—drunk—and ended up driving his car into the river at two in the morning. I mean, he lived, because the water's not very deep there, but he had a concussion and passed out on top of his car horn." Ryan grimaced. "Woke me up. I had such a headache the next day."

"Huh." Shane pondered that for a second. "So what you're saying is, we're up against some kind of magician who knows that the Los Angeles River has a body to wander around in, but knows how to block a supernatural entity from sensing that he's all up in its business doing murder shit with swords? For months at a time?"

"Well," Ryan said, "when you put it like that... Fuck."

* * *

After a day like that, patronising the local 'za slingers' delivery guy seemed the smart option. They knew Shane and Ryan's go-to order, after all. Shane had enough in his fridge to cobble together a salad to go with it, but he still felt like he was in a bit of a cheese and carb coma when he slumped on the sofa afterwards. Ryan didn't seem much more with it. He was lying on the floor, stocking feet propped up on the couch, so that he could use his phone while it was charging. From the low-level muttering that rose up from floor level, Shane would bet that Ryan was going through the work emails that had piled up in their absence. He should probably, he knew, try to triage his own inbox, because it wasn't going to get any better overnight.

Then again, Ryan Steven Bergara was the personification of a natural feature you could look up on Google Maps, so Shane was maybe justified in taking a few hours away from work in a mental health capacity.

Shane scrubbed at his eyes before reaching for his laptop again. Trying to find out something about the agicmay ullshitbay earlier had been a bust, but maybe Shane had been coming at it from the wrong perspective. After all, his forte with weird shit was most definitely with the variety produced by actual human beings. Give him an old-fashioned axe murder any day of the week.

In the historic, cold case sense.

"Do your powers give you like, the ability to hack into the servers of the LAPD or anything?" Shane said idly as he opened up a new browser tab and headed to Google. How to phrase a search in a way that wouldn't have a crack team of NSA agents on his doorstep within the hour?

Ryan slowly lowered his phone and looked up at Shane, both eyebrows very definitely raised. "Not that I know much about how they work, but that's not how they work. Also, what?"

"Well, I was just thinking that cops generally don't release all of the evidence in a case to the public, right? So if the stuff they _have_ released is strange and unsettling, who the hell knows what's in the records they haven't let the media know about. But if we could find out—"

"I'm a river, not a hacker," Ryan said, with a kind of withering matter-of-factness like _Shane_ was the one who was defying the laws of physics and causality on the reg.

"Sarcasm noted, my good man," Shane said, "but my point is, maybe if we dig into the victims some more, that might get us somewhere. Maybe there's a connection between them that the cops haven't publicised, or maybe there's a link that the cops wouldn't pick up on but that a river who's definitely not a hacker would."

"Maybe?" Ryan sat up. "But like, I literally only play an investigator on TV, and—"

The windows blew in.

Shane didn't realise what had happened at first: it was all so fast, and the force of the blast took the breath from his lungs and sent him tumbling ass over teakettle off the couch. Through the shock, Shane could feel his brain struggle to reboot, reminding his body that it knew how to breathe and there we go, that was it, his ribs stuttered and heaved and he was pushing himself up on shaking arms. It took him a moment to remember how to get his elbows to lock. Stupid fucking elbows, but suddenly Ryan was right there next to him, hands warm and solid as he helped Shane get to his feet.

Shane's head hurt.

"Shit, fuck, are you okay?" Ryan's voice was as threaded with panic as Shane had ever heard it. "Shit, you're bleeding."

Shane looked down at his forearms and blinked. That was definitely blood, and it was his, and there were little shards of glass here and there that—if Shane were a betting man—he'd say had done the damage. It wasn't just that the window glass that had shattered: even the frames had fallen in, as if they'd been pushed by some giant's hand. Not to mention the fact that—

Shane held out a hand. "Is it... _raining_? Inside my apartment?" He looked up and it was as if his living room ceiling had vanished, replaced by a roiling dark cloud that was spitting out raindrops and sparking in a way that said maybe it was thinking of producing a lightning bolt or three. That couldn't be good. Water was pooling on the floor.

"It's him," Ryan said urgently. "I can feel it, it's the killer, it's the same _signare_, we've got to get out of here before—"

And then there was another blast: no louder but more forceful, making Shane feel like each bone in his body had been compressed, its marrow bruised. This time, he couldn't even try to push himself up. He could feel rainwater soaking his clothes. Everything went dark.

When he woke up, Ryan was gone.

* * *

Ryan was gone, and his apartment looked like the aftermath of the kind of all-night keggers that Shane had never been cool enough to be invited to back in college. Splintered wood and shattered glass littered the floor. The indoor rainstorm had stopped, but water still dripped from the end of Shane's nose. His books were soaked, his laptop clearly a lost cause. From the top of one of the bookcases, a furious Obi yowled his displeasure. 

Shane could empathise, though mostly he felt like throwing up or passing out again or both. But he couldn't, because Ryan was gone. Faintly, through the gaping holes where his windows had once been, Shane could hear the sound of approaching sirens. 

"I'm really, really sorry about this," Shane said, picking up a still hissing Obi and shutting him into the bathroom. "But you could get out of the apartment and I have to go on the lam."

He grabbed Ryan's car keys and ran downstairs, his feet squishing unpleasantly in his wet shoes. Ryan wouldn't have left Shane willingly, which meant that the killer must have taken him; if the killer had taken him, that couldn't mean anything good. Shane swore up a blue streak as he pushed the seat back—fucking _legs_—and threw the car into drive and headed out of the complex's parking lot. He'd barely made it a block when he passed a cop car and a fire truck, their sirens blazing. 

Shane had the distinct feeling that his renter's insurance premiums were about to skyrocket.

He headed for the river, hoping that the killer was planning to lean into the magic-themed melodrama because Shane had not a single other clue as to where he might find him. It was late, but of course every asshole out there—and this was L.A., so there were a lot of them—had decided that they wanted to head east on Los Feliz right now, too. Traffic had slowed to a crawl. Shane could feel a vein throb in his temple and hoped that this whole serial killer business wasn't contagious. 

When he finally reached Sunnynook River Park, Shane didn't so much park Ryan's car as abandon it roughly in the first thing he saw that looked like a parking spot. He hoped that Ryan would forgive him—would be around to forgive him—for whatever kind of tickets he got. 

As Shane scrambled out of the car, something in the backseat caught his eye.

"Yoink," Shane said. There was probably some idiom waiting to be coined about the wisdom of taking a baseball bat to a magic fight—none, it wouldn't do a thing, what the fuck did Shane know?—but the weight of it was the best comfort he had as he jogged along the river's path, keeping an eye out for anything that looked even vaguely murderous. 

Shane heard them before he saw them: it reminded him of being a kid, visiting Niagara Falls with his family and feeling overwhelmed by how the whole world seemed full of the white noise of the falling water. There were no waterfalls here, but there was water, crashing together in ways that were definitely not natural—whirlpools and eddies, tides and waterspouts as tall as Shane—and all of it tinted the sodium yellow of the streetlights. 

And standing in the middle of it were Ryan and someone whom Shane had to assume was the Glendale Narrows Killer. He didn't look much like a serial killer, but Shane had co-starred in enough episodes of BFU to know that serial killers tended to hide in plain sight. 

Hell, the fact that this guy seemed so aggressively normal was probably one of the things that should set the alarm bells ringing: average height, average weight, a face that was neither attractive nor plain, hair a nondescript shade of brown, no scars or tattoos or odd clothing choices. This dude would look basic in a Starbucks in suburban Ohio. 

The only thing that was notable about the Killer at all was the fact that he was standing in the middle of what looked like a river on steroids, and that he was holding the sword from the riverbed so that the tip of it rested against Ryan's Adam's apple. Ryan was pale and sweaty, his hands clenched into fists at his side. He looked like he was in pain.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Shane said under his breath. He gracelessly vaulted the fence separating the bikepath from the river, and edged as close to the waters as he dared—he'd be no help to Ryan at all if he got swept out to the Pacific. "Hey, buddy," he yelled, "want to tell me what the fuck you think you're doing here, you absolute shithead?"

"I have no interest in you," the Killer said, without so much as looking Shane's way. All of his attention was focused on Ryan. "You can go."

And for a moment, Shane almost did. He felt his feet start to move of their own volition, because that was a good idea, right? To just go? None of this was any of his business after all. But then that patented Madej stubbornness kicked in and Shane realised that he could feel it: the clammy sensation of a thought that wasn't his own but that was inside his head, insistent that he wanted things he didn't. 

Shane tilted his head to one side and gave it a few hearty slaps with the heel of his hand, as if he were in the shower and some water had gotten in his ear. The principle probably transferred, right? Because like hell he was going to leave Ryan behind. Ryan was his, and fuck this guy anyway. _This is the droid I'm looking for_, said a small hysterical voice at the back of his mind. "That wasn't an answer to my question, fuckface!"

The Killer did turn to look at him now, mouth tightening in frustration. "_Go_," he said again, but now that Shane was ready for it he could plant his feet against the battered concrete, heft the baseball bat, and meet the press of the compulsion with a determination of his own. 

"Is that the best you've got?" Shane said, hoping like hell it was, because Shane was stubborn but this guy was a magical serial killer. Who the fuck knew the extent of his powers? Maybe he could murder people with his mind, or even make sure that Glenn Close finally won an Oscar. "Because you should know that you're talking to the person who took on the Goatman of Old Alton Bridge and _won_. I've got a 100% track record of victories when it comes to taking down demonic entities near bodies of water, so if I were you, I definitely would not be trying to fuck with me."

The Killer looked baffled now. "What the—"

"I eat demons for breakfast!" Shane roared at him, waving the baseball bat over his head like he was trying to summon an army into battle. "I am unafraid to touch possessed dolls! I am _strange_ and _off-putting_!"

The Killer must have been distracted enough for Ryan to shake the hold the Killer had over him. Ryan took a few steps back and the water level dropped and then rose suddenly, knocking the Killer off his feet and the sword from his hand and pushing him several feet upriver. Ryan made another funny gesture, and the sword flew off the ground and into his hand, Jedi-style. While Shane gaped, amazed—and, he had to admit, possibly a bit turned on? Because _Star Wars_—Ryan planted his feet and gripped the hilt with both hands, raising the sword as the Killer climbed back to his feet.

"If you want to take the River from me, you're going to have to do it the old fashioned way," Ryan said. His voice wavered a little, but the look on his face was nothing but determined. "No more of this puppet stuff, no more killing other people, no more sneak attacks."

"Yeah! Kick his ass, baby!" Shane whooped, feeling a sudden swoop of relief because if Ryan was on his feet then they had a chance. "I'll hold your flower!"

"What about any of this looks like _sneaking_?" the Killer asked, clearly exasperated. He muttered something under his breath that let him conjure up another sword out of thin air before squaring off against Ryan. Then he lunged.

Shane's entire knowledge of sword-fighting was derived from watching Hollywood movies and one History Channel documentary that was almost certainly wrong by virtue of the fact that it was a History Channel documentary, and they thought all of human history was the result of Hitler being in cahoots with the Little Green Men who built the pyramids. His knowledge was limited, in other words. Even so, he could tell that this wasn't a fight where either participant was holding back—and that this wasn't a fight where Ryan had the edge. 

He was strong, that went without saying, and the kind of sure-footed that came from knowing every square inch of the land around you. But Ryan didn't have technique, or the ability to read where his opponent was going to move next. He was a guy fighting with a sword, but the Killer was a swordsman. Ryan's sword arced out in a wide slash, the Killer parried with no real sign of effort, and forced Ryan off the island and into the river proper. 

Shane made a decision. It wasn't like he knew what the hell to do in a duel either, but maybe it was time to see what really happened when you brought a baseball bat to a magic fight. He waded out into the water.

"You won't be entirely gone, you know," the Killer was saying, pushing forward now with clean strokes of the sword that Ryan barely blocked: one, two, three. "The new _genius loci_ will have your memories. I just want a River who'll know to come when it's called."

Shane got it now, or thought he did. The Killer hadn't been killing for the sake of it. He'd been experimenting, trying to force the part of Ryan that was the River out of Ryan and into some poor person's body, like an aquatic zombie only much more fucked up. 

"And you need to get some new material! Jesus Christ, dude, can you hear yourself?" Shane yelled at him, then felt his knees buckle as the Killer flicked a careless hand in his direction. He went from vertical to horizontal with all the brutal efficiency of slipping on the sidewalk in a Chicago winter, only instead of ice and concrete he landed in the river itself, hissing at the sting of the water against scraped palms and bloodied knees and already-cut forearms. He landed awkwardly, and felt the baseball bat's handle crunch against his hand in a way that told him he'd probably broken a couple of fingers. _Super_. He used his good hand and the bat to lever himself to his feet.

"I've wasted too much time on you," the Killer said to Ryan, wading towards him. "The others had the good grace to know when they were beaten, but you—"

"I try not to make a habit of saying this," Ryan said, "but Shane's right, you sound like you swallowed some shitty B-movie." Ryan got in a lucky swing or two and caught the Killer on the upper arm, opening up a broad, shallow gash. Shane would have been much more cheered by the sight of Ryan getting first blood if it hadn't been for two things. One, the Killer's blood was most definitely not red. Two, the cut closed almost as soon as the Killer looked at it. 

"Oh fuck me sideways," Ryan said, wide-eyed, which was a mood. Shane empathised.

"Just stand _still_," the Killer said, exasperated, raising his sword to strike, and Shane took advantage of the split second lapse in the Killer's attention to swing for him. Shane had exactly zero innate sportsball ability, and the broken fingers didn't help, but it turned out you didn't need a huge amount of finesse when you were deliberately aiming a lump of wood at someone's skull. 

The Killer went down onto his knees. "You..." His words were slurred but he still had enough presence of mind to stretch out one hand and oh fuck, _fuck_, it wasn't that Shane had ever thought Admiral Piett had been having a good time when Vader Force-choked him, but it was one thing to know that abstractly and another to feel an invisible hand crush your windpipe. 

Shane gasped, lungs working desperately but not able to suck in any fresh oxygen. He couldn't breathe. He could see Ryan's face, a look of anguish on it like Shane had never seen before, and Shane wanted to say _it's okay, it's not your fault, Ryan, I—_, but he couldn't speak and there were dark spots at the edge of his vision and his knees shook and—

Ryan plunged his sword into the Killer's shoulder. The Killer howled and released his grip on Shane. Shane staggered, giddy both with the renewed ability to inhale and the sight of Ryan's blade emerging through the Killer's back.

"Oh fuck, oh fuck, I just stabbed someone," Ryan yelped.

"Do it again!" Shane cried.

"I _stabbed_ someone, dude!" Ryan said. 

The Killer's blood, black and viscous, smoked where it spattered against the runes that were etched into Ryan's blade. He was grunting, low and visceral, and trying to get enough of a grasp on the sword to pull it out, but it was too slick with his own blood. 

"I saw!" Shane said. "Good job, thumbs up, 5 stars on Yelp, now do it _again_ before he murders us!"

"Shit," Ryan said, trying to grab the sword's hilt. The Killer howled. "_Shit_. It won't come out, it's stuck."

"How can it be _stuck_?" Shane said, hearing his voice rise an octave or seven. Was this what hysteria felt like? This was maybe what hysteria felt like.

"Do I look like an expert on fucking.... magic swords and the fucking anatomy of, of shoulder blades?"

"I don't know, Ryan! You tell me!" Shane spat. "It's been a _day_."

Blood started trickling down the Killer's chin now, spilling from his mouth, and Shane was not an anatomical expert either but he was pretty sure that was a bad sign. Like, a "death imminent" bad sign. But the Killer was slowly getting to his feet. The water around him began to bubble, a pot coming to the boil. There was a smell, too, like a skunk had been double-fisting shots of sulphur and flickering sparks began to cluster around his clenching fists. 

Okay, so Shane wasn't an expert in _anything_ going on right now, but that seemed empirically bad.

"Not that I want to dictate to you what to do in the middle of your own river," Shane said hurriedly, taking an inadvertent step back, "but honestly, this might be the time to start remembering how to use some of that mojo of yours, Ryan, because, uh."

"You little fuck," the Killer gurgled around a mouthful of oil-thick blood. "Just for that I'm going to make this slow."

Ryan's hands were in fists at his side now and he was breathing fast and shallow, like he was on the edge of a panic attack, but when he turned to look at Shane, his face was set and his eyes were, they looked—

It wasn't like Shane had forgotten, but here was a reminder: Ryan wasn't human.

"Believe in me," he said.

Shane blinked. "What?"

"I'm a god, I need believers, I need the boost," Ryan said, in a voice like a river rising, in a voice like the strength of water to wear away stone. "I need you to _believe in me_."

Whenever someone asked Shane about his religious beliefs, he usually shrugged and said something along the lines of, "Terminally lapsed Lutheran." It was technically true, and gave him some wiggle room with the kind of person who might clutch at the ole metaphorical pearls if Shane said what he actually believed, which was a cheerful kind of nihilism. Church had been a rote chore when he was a kid, and a thing he avoided now. He'd never had any kind of faith, never felt any sense of communion with the ineffable whatever. 

But now he looked at Ryan and he _believed_. How could he not? Ryan was the world made flesh, right there in front of him, with no room for doubt but plenty for the good kind of fear. Shane couldn't doubt because Ryan was right there, meeting his gaze, all the empirical proof that Shane had ever demanded but never received. Because Ryan was asking him. Because Ryan had one of the biggest hearts of anyone Shane had ever met. Because Shane admired him in roughly inverse proportion to the amount that Ryan could irritate him on a daily basis. 

And because… because well fuck it, if Shane couldn't admit it in the privacy of his own head when they might both be about to die, when would he ever? Because Shane was more than a little bit in love with him.

It was like a kind of feedback loop: the more that Shane believed in him, the more that Ryan seemed to glow, limned by power, the waters swirling around his feet; the more of Ryan, of the Ryan-that-was-the-River that Shane could see, the more he believed. He was faintly aware that his face was wet—river water and tears—and that he was so hard it ached.

"Yes," Ryan said, voice rich with satisfaction. He was smiling, and it was the kind of smile that made Shane want to pray: that made him want to go to his knees and promise things. "Oh yes, this is what I was like before. I remember now." He turned to look at the Killer, who seemed to have shrunk and who was most definitely afraid. "You wanted to rip me out of myself and stuff me inside a puppet and _use_ me? You have no idea what you were trying to do."

"I will make you serve me," the Killer said. Drops of his blood fell into the water where it hissed and smoked. "All you are is a—"

"Stop talking," Ryan—the River—said, and the Killer stopped talking. Ryan made a dismissive gesture with one hand. Now the Killer didn't even have a mouth to talk with, just pale blank skin stretched over an anguished jaw. "That's not how it works. You don't get to kill people because you want to make puppets of them. And you definitely don't get to command _me_."

Ryan held up his arms and the river's level rose abruptly, swallowing him and the Killer both. Shane, left standing by himself on a little island of dry land, could only gape up at the crest of the waters, some ten feet over his head. Then just as quickly as the water had risen, it was gone again. 

And now it was just them: just Shane and Ryan, and a Ryan who looked like _Ryan_ again, although he was now soaked from head to foot, his hair plastered to his forehead. There was no sign of the Killer, or the swords, or the baseball bat. The river had swept it all clean away. Shane and Ryan stared at one another.

"Well," Shane said eventually. "That worked."

* * *

The walk back to the car was awkward. Shane's watch had succumbed to the repeated dunkings but he was pretty sure it was well after midnight, and the chill of a Californian desert night meant that he was freezing. His cuts and bruises stung, his busted fingers ached, and with every step he took, Shane was reminded of the mess of tacky, cooling come in his underwear on account of how the sight of Ryan being ethereally beautiful while wielding supernatural power did it for him now, apparently. 

What a Monday.

"So what—" Shane said, at the same time that Ryan said, "You don't have to—", and they spent a minute talking over one another, each insisting that the other should talk.

Eventually Shane mimed zipping his lips and gestured elaborately to encourage Ryan to speak.

"I'm so sorry for dragging you into all of this," Ryan said, scrubbing a hand through his drying hair. "I didn't expect anything to happen like this and I get that it's... that my whole deal is a lot, and if you want to just walk away, I get it. I don't want to put you under any obligation, or—"

"Are you kidding me?" Shane broke in. "Take this as like, carte blanche to use me as a magical battery whenever some supernatural nut is trying to off me. No court would convict, Ry."

Ryan looked at him oddly. "No, not that. I mean, not only that. From before, too." 

Shane had no idea what he was talking about. "Could we maybe use our words here?"

Ryan huffed but didn't speak. He stopped, reached out instead and took Shane's hurt hand in his, very very carefully. His head was bowed so Shane couldn't see his face, but Shane could feel Ryan's breath against his palm and then the feather-light touch of Ryan's fingers against his broken ones. Shane sucked in a startled breath. It was that same, static-shock feeling he'd had earlier when Ryan had tried to sense any _vestigia_ on him, only far more intense. Not that Shane had any direct experience of it, but he imagined it was sort of like what it would feel like to have each individual vertebra replaced with a compressed sphere of ball lightning. 

Ryan took his hand away, and Shane realised two things. One, he was hard again, and two, his fingers didn't hurt any more. They didn't hurt because they were no longer broken, all trace of bruising and swelling gone. He wiggled them, shocked, and then stared again when he realised that all the scrapes and cuts had vanished from his forearms.

"That's what I mean," Ryan said, sounding miserable. "That's what I realised, earlier. It _shouldn't_ have been like that, touching you, it's never happened to me before, but it was, and I shouldn't take advantage of it, man."

"Again," Shane said slowly. It was taking a lot of effort not to reach out and hold Ryan's hand again, to take Ryan's hand and press it to his face. "I'm going to advocate for precise vocabulary here."

"I should have found some other way of getting the, the power boost," Ryan said as they started to walk again. "Knowing how I'd reacted to you earlier, it wasn't cool of me to draw on you like that. It wasn't... it wasn't right."

Shane took a moment to translate that from Bergara-speak. He felt his eyes widen. "Are you saying you're feeling conflicted about righteously smiting an actual serial killer because you want to jump my bones?"

The tips of Ryan's ears turned pink.

"Are you having a magical conflict of interest because you think I'm a snack?"

Ryan closed his eyes. "Please stop talking."

"Are you saying I popped some kind of mystical cherry for you? Did I—"

Ryan opened his eyes. They were that weird non-colour again. "Stop talking," he said again. 

Shane stopped talking, and for a long, blissful moment he couldn't imagine ever wanting to speak again—why would anyone ever want to—wasn't it nice, just being quiet—wasn't it nice, making Ryan happy—and then just as he became aware of a nauseating pressure at the back of his skull, it lifted. He blinked.

"That's what I mean," Ryan said quietly. "I can make people _do_ things, if I want to. I try not to, but I can. And when I touched you before, I knew it... it was always going to be easier with you. To use you for a power boost, or make you do things, or… or m-make you want me back. And I don't want to—"

Shane felt his whole world shift on its axis: oceans sloshing around, minor earthquakes, birds flying disoriented because of moving magnetic fields, the whole nine yards. For the length of a single stride, he felt his knees wobble. Ryan sounded serious about this. Ryan wanted _him_? 

"Hold up, hold up." Shane raised a hand and took a breath. "Look, okay, you're giving me a lot here, so let's take this in order. First, this is the kind of thing you do on the show all the time."

Ryan stared. "What? I—"

"You conflate two _entirely separate_ things and then draw conclusions based on that which are, quite frankly, bullshit. You—"

"I do _not_!"

They reached the car and Shane unlocked it. Thankfully, after everything, the key still worked. "This is pretty much up there with 'the Bermuda Triangle is the lost city of Atlantis'—"

"First of all, I never said that—"

"And just gets causation all sorts of wrong! I mean to clarify, I'm glad you're invested in whether I consent to you using me as a cosmic power-up, but I'm not precious about this shit. Pretty much any time there's a serial killer on the loose in my vicinity, have at it." Shane waved his hands up and down, gesturing at his torso. "Waiver signed, sealed, delivered."

"I mean, I'd like for there to be no more serial killers a—"

"But that..." Shane stretched his arms out wide. "That is this far apart from the separate issue of feelings and all associated what-have-yous."

"Look, I said I don't want you to feel obligated—" 

"Of course you did! Because I get how your squirrelly little brain works," Shane said. "You have feelings, and you get all up in your own head and you catastrophise about them, and maybe you read some weird stuff on the internet, and forget that maybe I have my own feelings independent of anything else, and boom: you just conspiracy-theoried your own self. Which is maybe a record."

"I..." Ryan looked confused. "Did I?"

"You're working from two presumptions here but eh, I gotta tell you, not seeing so much of a foundation," Shane said. "First, you're presuming that the whole static shock thing was bad when who the fuck knows what it means? Not me, because I didn't go to Hogwarts and neither did you. And second, you're thinking like oh, I'm having pants _and_ heart feelings about Shane but he's only having pants feelings about me because I touched him in a sexy magic way, but newsflash, you dingus, I have an entire, regular, and elaborate day-dream fantasy about spooning you that I came up with long before any of _this_ bullshit."

Ryan's jaw dropped. "You do not."

Shane sighed. Caught. "Okay, so you're the one spooning me. But the point about causation still stands."

"I have no idea what to do with any of this," Ryan said. 

He was gaping like a landed fish, which was objectively unattractive but Shane still wanted to head on down to Bone Town with him so really, who was the bigger fool here?

Shane settled for saying, "That seems a common reaction," because dignity, always dignity. 

They got into the car, and sat there in silence for a moment. Shane was suddenly so overwhelmingly tired that he couldn't really remember how to start the thing. Ryan was staring fixedly at the dashboard.

"You know," Shane said. "My apartment's trashed so hard that best case scenario is my landlord kicks me out without suing. My cat probably wants to put a hit out on me."

"And we have to go to work tomorrow," Ryan replied, "and say hey, you uh, you remember that episode you sent us out to film by ourselves because our entire budget was thirty-seven cents and a Yankee Candle coupon? We've got nothing."

"A homeless and unemployed film major with a cat and a Honda in the Greater Los Angeles area," Shane said. "I am a non-clichéd _catch_."

"I'd still make out with you," Ryan said, looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

"Yeah?" Shane said. If he were a better man, he'd probably be a little embarrassed at how eager he sounded, but he made internet videos for a living: he'd had his shame glands excised long ago.

"Wanna make out right now?" Ryan said, eyebrows rising hopefully.

"Hot diggity," Shane said.

It wasn't anything like the last few times Ryan had touched him. The only unexpected shock this time came from the gearshift digging itself into Shane's ribcage when he leaned in. The kiss didn't feel like a plunge into an icy lake, or a thunderstorm, or lightning flickering along his spine. But Ryan's fingers, tentative at Shane's cheek, running through the damp strands of his hair, left goosebumps in their wake, and the heat of Ryan's mouth—well. It was enough to make Shane believe in all kinds of things.

**Author's Note:**

> In the Tongva language, Paayme Paxaayt means "Western River." All of the villages named by Ryan once existed. The land which now constitutes Griffith Park was apparently once a haunted ostrich farm, and is indeed now home to a playground called Shane's Inspiration. For much of the 20th century, the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was one of the most polluted rivers in the U.S.: so polluted that it caught on fire more than a dozen times. The fact that a river was catching on fire (it is a _river_ made of _water_) helped to create the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.


End file.
